Dental care providers may create a three dimensional (“3D”) physical model or cast of one or more areas of a patient's oral cavity. With a 3D physical model, a care provider can interact with the model to quickly view multiple angles of the model and to visualize adjustments made to the model. For example, care providers may create a model of an area of a patient's oral cavity where one or more teeth are missing or damaged, so that suitable replacement teeth may be made in the lab using the model as a guide.
Proper fitting the lab-made teeth would benefit from an understanding of how the teeth are used by the patient. In other words, somehow linking the model to the mechanics of the patient's bite is desirable. In the past, care providers have used a mechanical device called an articulator in conjunction with the models to replicate movement of the patient's mandible about a bite axis. This is a crude replication of the bite and often fails to capture intricacies of the bite motion, including habitual adaptation of the bite to malformations of the teeth. Habitual adaptation of the bite often occurs via muscle training. In addition to failing to capture the complex curvature of the bite, the known methods are imprecise and inaccurate, as the care provider is often mounted to soft tissue, record data via a pen, or introduce error during different portions of a procedure. Articulators are manually adjusted based on recorded data. This provides two windows for errors. A third window for error is in model creation. What is needed is a system which can accurately and precisely capture bite motion and simulate bite motion so that a care provide can better study bite motion. To reach a better understanding of a patient's physiology and proposed care options, care providers have expressed a desire to be able to study bite motion physically, rather than in 2 dimensions.